We are super excited to have welcomed the newest member of our family into the world on Thursday!
Portia Eve Monson was born at 4:25 PM on March 10, 2016! She weighed 6 lbs 4 oz and was 18 inches long. She is beautiful and perfect, and we all love her a million!
Here’s some more photographic evidence!
Brand New!
Sticking out her tongue at Daddy! Her tongue may be her current favorite toy.
Happiest big sister in the whole world!
Jordan and Crystal’s family went with Kathryn and Grandmother to Disneyland a few weeks ago, and as we heard talk of warm weather and a getaway, we Monsons got a little stir-crazy and decided we needed to get away for a bit as well. However, we didn’t go quite as far.
The day after St. Patrick’s Day, we drove down to St. George. While there, we went swimming, went running, ate lots of yummy food, and enjoyed the feel of summer–warm weather and no work!
Fay loved swimming! And she looked SO cute in her swimming suit!
This is the family at “The Crack.” Josh and I took turns scooting through while the other kept the baby. For some reason we just didn’t both fit at the same time. 🙂
As most of you know, I love St. Patrick’s Day. As all of you know, flowers are ridiculously expensive at Valentine’s Day. So, my sweet Josh got me these BEAUTIFUL flowers for St. Patrick’s Day! They have kept our house feeling nice and springy even after the snow returned!
Fay is doing exceptionally well. She has a reputation in the NICU as being “too cute to handle”. She has been doing very well with her feedings and is being fed three times a day. There have been a few times, including last night, when she ate so much from Elisabeth that she didn’t need to be supplemented from the feeding tube. The nurse said yesterday that she might be moved to 3/4 feedings a day soon.
Fay weighs almost 5 lbs. She loves the color pink. Her favorite hobby is pulling at the tape which holds her feeding tube to her face. She loves taking baths. She doesn’t really like having her temperature taken. Fay likes showing off how well she eats when she is being observed by an occupational therapist. She gets the hiccups every time she eats.
Basically, she is adorable and doing awesome.
One note about the very last picture. When Fay was born, she was about the same size as that bear next to her. Look how much she has grown in two weeks!
Here is an update on the rocking chair that I’ve been building for Elisabeth.
After letting the glue dry for a few days it was time to get back to work. The back and the front were already done so I attached them with cross bars.
Next was adding the seat. The seat, along with the back panels and the arms, is made out of cedar. I added some angled braces to help support the weight so the seat wouldn’t break.
This is the chair, which looks more like a throne at this point, after adding the arm rests.
The easy part is now over. The final requirement is to make the chair rock. I used a 2×8 made of redwood and cut the rockers out. I traced the rockers from another rocking chair just to make sure I got them right. After cutting them out I hand to sand them down so they would provide a smooth rock.
Once the rockers were cut out all that was left was to attach them to the bottom of the chair. In order to get a good rock (not too far back and not too far forward) I had to cut a bit off the legs (more off the back).
The construction is now complete! The chair is pretty comfortable and rocks nicely. Elisabeth wants to make some cushions for it, which would look nice on the solid wood. I just need to sand it down and lacquer it.
Summary:
Weight: about 5 lbs.
Height: 50″
Cost: $65
Types of wood used: Redwood and cedar
Hours taken: Around 10
Power tools used: Miter saw, jig saw, scroll saw, biscuit jointer, belt sander, electric screwdriver
Broke: 2 drillbits, 1 jigsaw blade, 1 scroll saw blade
Non-power tools used: Tape measure, square, pencil, wood glue, clamps, pliers, muscles–although these probably belong under the list of power tools 😉
Times cut: 0–an all time low!
Trips to home depot: 1–another all time low!
Now that school is out for the summer I decided that I needed a project. With the upcoming arrival of Pup I thought that the best project would be to design and build a rocking chair for Elisabeth.
After scouring the internet for ideas, I came up with a design of my own.
Today Elisabeth and I went to Home Depot and bought some wood. This chair will be built out of redwood and cedar. We took it home and I started cutting.
In order to attach the panels on the back I got to play with a fun toy: a bicuit jointer.
The biscuit jointer cuts a little rounded slot into the end of the board.
The slot is filled with wood glue and a wooden biscuit is placed inside.
Before cutting the cross boards.
After cutting the cross boards.
The panels are attached via biscuits to the cross boards.
Attaching the front legs.
The front and back legs. I decided to stop there for the day and let all the wood glue dry.
I’ll post updates as I make progress on the chair.
This last week we traveled down to St. George. It was SO much fun!
We arrived Thursday evening (19 April). We got to our hotel, unpacked and then headed off to find some food! We had made a list of restaurants in the area that sounded good (thank you internet!) and we went to one of those called the “Tiki Island Broiler.” It was quite similar to the idea of Rumbi, and it was quite yummy! Also, they had a GORGEOUS place outside to eat! It was the perfect temperature, there was a fountain trickling away, we could hear kids playing in the pool nearby, and there were palm trees! We felt like we were in paradise! (It’s amazing how good it feels to be away from school for a while!)
The next day we found another great restaurant by chance. We saw a sign for Belgian waffles and we HAD to go check it out. It turns out that “Bear Paw Coffee” is a happening spot in St. George. We drove past it quite a few times and there was ALWAYS a line outside of it. We had perfect timing, however, and didn’t have to wait at all! It makes a big difference when you’re in a group of 2 instead of 8!
After Breakfast, we went to a cool place called the “Coyote Gulch Art Village” outside of St. George in a place called Kayanta. There are around 80 artists that collaborate to set up a bunch of galleries including painting, photography, crafts, jewelry, pottery, etc. We saw some beautiful things! Saturday (the day after we were there) they had a big chalk drawing competition. We took some pictures of our favorite ones.
On Saturday, we started out our day by checking out the center of town. We went to the Tabernacle (and heard some fabulous cello/piano music!), we found a cute little toy store, we checked out the “town square” type thing that had fountains for kids to play in, and we found this random statue of Brigham Young. We’re basically BFF by now.
The highlight of our vacation was the Kite Festival! This is apparently the second largest annual event in southern Utah. There were tons of people there! We were probably the only people over the age of 12 who were there without toting along somebody who was under the age of 12. 🙂 The school kids love to come especially because if they do a certain number of hours of reading for school they get to redeem their tracking paper for a free kite!
This just had to be documented!
Despite being “grown ups” we had lots of fun with our kites!
The wind wasn’t very strong and so if you wanted your kite to stay up you had to run it basically constantly. I am proud to say that Pup and I were able to keep the kite up for at least a couple minutes!
Josh and I both received pretty impressive farmer tan lines (okay, they were just burns)!
That evening, we decided to do something manly. We went to a place called DUBs (Devey’s Urban Barbeque). It was pretty good eatin’. Although it didn’t quite match up to that BBQ we had in Texas.
On Sunday, we went to visit the St. George Temple. It was beautiful! The grounds are covered in flowers! So, of course, we had to document it! Josh took these ones!
And this is the whole family in front of the temple! I will never get over how white that building is! It is just stunning!
We had such a great vacation! And now we’re back to school and work full time!
